Ah, I see what they did there. That's not really a cannon anymore, that's a drone launched from a cannon with ramjet propulsion system pushing it up to mach 5. It's a guided bullet. I'd say it's a missile, but it doesn't even really need a warhead to deliver it's payload at those velocities, the only reason it'd need any kind of bang would be to increase the area of it's final delivery (which might not be a bad thing, it wouldn't take too much 'random' motion to eliminate the targeting potential of this kind of delivery system, but if you could deliver a shotgun blast from 100 km it might not matter if the target attempts to evade XD)
I agree that at some point technologies converge in ways that make the old categories obsolete in a sense. You could have a launcher for missile that first fires the missile away before the missile activates and so on, a round is not a missile without it's own guidance system and propulsion. In this sense even with the old categories it's not really a missile or a rocket but a kinetic hypervelocity round. Since it's an artillery system and they were going for a 'general multi-purpose round' for it you will most likely have some form of HE warhead on it as well that can utilize multiple fuze types for different effects against different targets.
I mean if an Abrams counts as “cavalry” suffice to say that anyone with a gun bigger than a horse can call it whatever they like.
I'd probably classify it more as a velocity actuated rocket than a round, a rocket does not imply guidance. Though a missile does not require guidance, either, really the difference between rocket and missile are more related to whether there's a warhead present than whether it's guided. even a dumb-fire missile is still a missile, though I suppose it might be considered a rocket if the warhead is timed instead of triggered. Either way, the definitions are all borked anyway, since a rock can qualify as a missile when thrown and a missile is really just the combination of a rocket, bomb, and triggering device. And then we have torpedo which people constantly attempt to remove from underwater but never really provide a good reason for doing so. And then some idiot director decided to use bombs in space.
Oh yea, stuff gets really dumb really quick when people try to force ancient categorization for modern things. "So, the tanks are the cavalry but what is the modern equivalent to my rapier and what is the equivalent to the parry dagger?" well there ain't none, it doesn't work that way to be honest and to dumb it down like that only results in more confusion as opposed to improved understanding. "In modern language, a missile, also known as a guided missile, is a guided airborne ranged weapon capable of self-propelled flight usually by a jet engine or rocket motor." "Airborne explosive devices without propulsion are referred to as shells if fired by an artillery piece and bombs if dropped by an aircraft. Unguided jet-propelled missiles are usually described as rocket artillery. In ordinary language, the word missile can refer to any projectile that is thrown, shot or propelled toward a target." By the time we were in gymnasium the Finnish teachers really drilled it hard to us that when one is writing an essay or longer text that it is often good to simply take up your key terms and simply define them open to avoid massive confusions throughout the text and undue criticism. This simple act often helps even people who tend to use a different definition themselves to be able to read through the paper and understand what is being said as opposed to being caught up with "oh man, the archers were lobbing missiles at the enemy but where's the guidance system or the propellant?" Bombs in space. If you are going to have to fly all the way to the enemy, knock his hatch and then go surprise! You just might consider ditching the crew, the life support, the big reactor to power the life support, the crew, the crew spaces, heating system for the crew, cockpit, all of it - and just putting the bomb in front and then maybe a slab of armor just on the front and using all of the remaining mass for one powerful engine and replacing the crew with a guidance system. And you know what? It costs less so you can have more of them and they fly faster so you can have more of them approaching from different vectors. And because they are so fast you can have better armor on them only in the front. And since that is a thing, why not just add a hyperspace drive to it? That's what they did in Star Trek - the torpedo was an antimatter bomb that had it's own warp propulsion system - you know because if everyone is hopping around FTL then what happens as soon as you detect incoming fire that is also slow as fuck? Gee, you can just jump from the incoming mass of fire because you're not going to easily defeat a FTL ship with especially slow weapons, duh. Need to write a ton of McGuffins to get around that. Suddenly your drive doesn't work near planets or or yea! Despite flying non-stop for 3 years and being able to constantly accelerate and decelerate at whim in FTL pursuits somehow your ship cannot just engage the drive when it doesn't suit the weak plot that you just came up and don't want to change. Should they have FTL torpedoes? Nah. Does it actually take a long time to fly from star system to another? Yes but if you just hit the jump now you're going to crash into a star. I mean you can't just point the ship at 99.99% of void surrounding you and make course corrections after you've saved yourself. And that's when you get the: "But you're not thinking it as you should. You should be applying 17th century sail boat mentality to this 5 person interstellar warp equipped craft that packs enough energy to wipe out all life from an entire planet - so shut up and heave to! Take the main sail down and sew some stitches to it, I don't want any wind slipping through the cracks! We are now 600 meters from the enemy battleship so we're well beyond their gun range, tailing them from a safe distance..."
So there's been some new developments in room-temperature semiconductors, albeit with about 2.5 million asterisks.
Some vertical launch systems on navy ships are cold launch where the missile is launched not by the missiles engine itself I think there are shipboard missile launchers that are not vertical launch systems that fire a missile out (like a torpedo) and the engine ignites shortly after that before it can hit the water. As to bombs in space I think x-wing vs tie fighter did it right. I guess technically it could have been a mine too. But in that they launched in the direction you were going and their speed was based on your speed/velocity. So if you were moving slow the bomb would move slow and not change speed. I have no idea if they were guided or not. I think they were. Also if you were not moving and launched one it would be a mine. I think I accidently blew myself up a few times due to that.
I was always going to give spaceships in my space strategy game the ability to use various cold launch systems, they have a lot of advantages and in some configurations you could minimize the launch signature and it would not be easy to know if you had launched or not which is always a nice thing since so much of missile defense is based on knowing that you are being fired at. As to bombs, mines are area denial weapons. Thus any bomb can become a mine. I've yet to hear of mines being dropped directly at targets though because they tend to have more complex construction than regular bombs - such as more complex triggers and being built to enable concealment or stealth.
Well in space a mine and a bomb (specifically a dumb bomb) would be pretty much they same thing aside from intended use. If you mean a bomb is essentially an unpropelled (aside from velocity imparted on it), and unguided explosive.
In a sense you'd kinda want the bombs to be larger nuclear yields too. Even if slinging them at the enemy it can be quite hard to actually hit anything - but if they can melt steel at 2 km radius and blind sensors and cause all manner of nuisance for 1000km radius they suddenly become a lot more useful. In fact it would seem like semi-directional or shaded nuclear bombs would make a pretty useful measure for simultaneously jamming the enemy to mask your fleet and to get nice strong reflections off of them to pulse ping their positions.
Well, all said though, it is possible to maintain obscene pressure levels (once achieved in the first place) than it is to maintain obscenely low temperatures. The problem then simply becomes structures that can house them at those levels. A battery that explodes to the order of pressures that would literally force a human to quite easily thread the eye of a needle isn't significantly less dangerous than one smothered in liquid gas that can flash freeze your flesh in seconds.
Essentially, one atom thin graphene sheet produces rippling or vibrating effect in room temperature that produces a low charge. The energy from thermal movement is converted by the graphene film into current. This could lead to small electric devices that have permanent batteries capable of converting the heat - the atomic movement - into electricity to use with the device.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-first-mars-trip-2024 SpaceX could send first Starship to Mars in 4 years.
Everybody tie down Ben Affleck. For once I would like our interplanetary missions to *not* center around rescuing him.
Sure we can use that for LED's but what's the difference between low potential and high potential? Generally, it's just volume. Maybe it'll take some squirrelly electrical logic to use these graphene sheets the same way we use cells in a battery, but if someone figures it out we'll be able to create batteries that never discharge and can operate virtually anything within reason. (still have to have enough available current to do the work, which may become impractical for larger workloads)
Oh definitely most likely will be just enough for the very lightest applications like a sensor, a clock or so. Simple stuff that even now only requires those tiniest batteries and runs them like a year or so without needing replacement - but the replacement itself makes things like medical implants quite awkward whereas under skin implantation becomes much easier when you don't need to consider the need to access the batteries all the time - even once every two years feels 'all the time' when you're having to cut through the skin.
